Business email retention

Email retention is a feature that provides a tamper-proof copy of every email sent or received, accessible only by administrators of the business. This feature is only available to business accounts. The system is flexible enough to meet the demands of most industries:

Retention can be enabled or disabled per account.

It can be separately enabled or disabled for sent email and/or received email per account.

Email is retained in special read-only folders that can not be altered by any user, but can be viewed by a Business administrator.

Enabling or disabling retention also generates an email, so you can confirm that retention has not been tampered with.

Flexible retention policies are available, so you can decide how long to keep emails based on your business/industry requirements.

Prices are based on the storage you use: currently $2.50 USD per account, per GB, per month (see below for more details).

How to enable retention

To enable email retention in your business account:

Log in to an administrator account, or as the master user for your business.

For the account you want to enable retention for, click the [+] link to expand the account details.

Click the "Set archiving..." link.

You'll be taken to a screen where you can choose whether to enable retention of incoming and/or outgoing email. You can also set extra Bcc addresses to send a copy of the user's sent email to.

Retention pricing

Because our retention system is flexible, and because different businesses and industries have different retention policies and requirements, our pricing is based on the total size of email retained for a user.

This means in a basic case, you could use retention as a short term backup and monitoring system. For instance, you could enable a 3-month retention policy so that any email a user deleted within the last 3 months could be easily restored, or you can view a log of all emails sent by a user in the last 3 months. With the relatively low storage used by 3 months of emails, this would be a relatively cheap way of buying this peace-of-mind.

In industry compliance cases, where 5-year, 7-year or even longer retention periods are required, there's no arbitrary limits to the size, number or bandwidth of emails sent/received that can be retained. You can keep everything for as long as you need.

The price is calculated and charged on the 1st calendar day of each month. For each user archive, $2.50 is charged for each gigabyte or part thereof in the user's retention account.

As an example, consider 3 users with the following retained email on the 1st day of a month.

Note that the pricing is per archive, not per user. Deleting a user doesn't remove the existing archive (by default it is retained for historical purposes). Deactivating archiving of new messages still leaves the existing archive in place.